


Ex Machina In Tenebris

by sual



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, Brief Trans!Hux, Dark, Droid fetish, Gender Dysphoria, Gender or Sex Swap, Literal objectification, M/M, Murder, Prostitution, Rape/Non-con Elements, Robophilia, Throwaway Character Deaths, Transhumanism, Violence, Virgin Kylo Ren, droid!Hux, sort of, sort of???
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-21
Updated: 2016-05-28
Packaged: 2018-06-09 17:21:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6916417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sual/pseuds/sual
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kylo Ren and General Hux are both Snoke's creations. In Hux’s case, it’s only slightly more literal. </p>
<p>An alternative, dark side take on my droid!Hux AU <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/6443686/chapters/14747230">“Ex Machina”</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So this fic might not make much sense if you haven't [read the "Light Side" version](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6443686/chapters/14747230). I wanted to do a darker take on it with Kylo Ren in the picture instead of Ben Solo, and from Hux's point of view, so this fic is a little less humourous and more angsty and smutty. There's also a lot of time skipping back and forth because otherwise Kylo wouldn't turn up for ages and ages, haha. 
> 
> I'm not entirely sure where this fic will go yet, I have a lot of ideas, but I'm throwing this first chapter to the wind anyway!

_Subject Age 22, Body #01_  
_18 Years Post-Battle of Endor_  
_Specialist Mission #31, Target: (Redacted)_  
_Dispatch method: N/A_

 

Snoke’s faceless guard shoves Hux unceremoniously into small, dark quarters, before pushing a bundle of fabric into his arms that the naked droid supposes is meant to pass for clothing. He turns sharply to level his best icy look at the guard, but the hulking thing only stares back at him blankly before hitting the panel to slide the door shut, lock engaging with a heavy _clunk_. Hux sighs irritably. Stars, but he hates the guards that populate Snoke’s citadel; they never speak, and their dark, hooded robes and smooth, faceless masks give no clue as to what or who might lie underneath. He’s not even certain they’re sentient.

With a frown, he gingerly unfolds the bundle the guard had gifted him with and snorts immediately upon inspecting it. As if the cotton-candy-pink hair his handlers have fitted him with isn’t insulting enough, the clothing appears to be some form of lingerie better suited to a Twi’lek, gauzy and sheer and of absolutely no practical use. He would rather greet his target naked than stoop to wearing this, thank you very much.

Hux looks around the room for somewhere to hide the awful thing and feels his spirits drop further. Whoever this apprentice of Snoke’s is, their quarters are…well. It’s not that there’s a mess to be made, since the gloomy room only contains one wide, low bed (unmade, Hux notes with a wrinkled nose) and nothing else. Two doors, to what he assumes is a refresher and a closet. But the metal walls are littered with deep scores and burns and scrapes over every inch – even the ceiling and floor seem to have caught some of the action.

This is not a person that takes care of their toys. And Hux is about to be that toy.

The droid sighs again, carefully hiding the gauzy clothing between the mattress and the bed-frame. He’d known he would be punished for his little…outburst, after mission #30. He couldn’t really get away with dispatching an entire unit of specialist First Order personnel in cold blood, no matter how careful he had been to destroy all the evidence, but the thought that the Supreme Leader himself might be the one to hand down punishment had never crossed his mind – a mistake he won’t soon forget. Hux had been shuttled off to the citadel with little circumstance and informed of his ‘mission’ with malicious glee.

So here he is, in only a pink-haired scalp-piece trying to arrange his target’s messy sheets into some semblance of order. Ridiculous. For the first time in his dubious career in “espionage”, as his handlers rather charitably call it, he won’t even have the pleasure of killing his target once the night is over. (He glances at the gouges on the walls and very pointedly does not think about whether he will be the one destroyed by the end of this.)

He drapes himself artfully across the bed, one of the black sheets wrapped low on his hips, and thinks _please, stars, don’t let this one be into any weird shit_ , and waits.

 

*

 

_Subject Age 16  
12 Years Post-Battle of Endor_

 

Hux is going to die a virgin.

Of all the things he could be thinking at this moment, this is the ludicrous thought that his mind chooses to linger on. The Supreme Leader’s faceless, soulless guards are wheeling his gurney towards the throne room, Hux’s father and a handful of officers and scientists close on their heel. He’s felt, first hand, how Snoke can reach into a person’s thoughts; he should attempt to think of something dignified in these final moments of his life. Of his long dead mother maybe, waiting for him on the other side…no, too sentimental. She died in childbirth and he never knew her. His nanny droid did an exemplary job in replacing the woman. Besides that, he’s never held any particularly strong beliefs about there being an afterlife. Only in this moment, minutes away from his inevitable, painful death, if the other test subjects have been anything to go by, does the idea of an afterlife become appealing.

_I’m going to die a virgin_ , his mind unhelpfully supplies again unbidden, along with a profound sense of injustice. One day, years in the future, he will be unspeakably grateful for this fact; but at this moment Hux is 16, crippled by the Academy’s experiments and sexually frustrated – perhaps these last minute regrets were inevitable for a teenager, he thinks.

Hux sighs deeply, watching the high arches of the ceiling move past above him. He is the last of the Academy’s test subjects for the droid project; were it not for his father’s influence, he’d probably already be among the corpses and drooling, mindless messes the other cadets in the test group have been turned into. If his father feels any regret for enrolling him in the program, he does not show it. Nor did he betray any reaction to Snoke insisting that, despite the thirty-odd failures that came before him, Hux will be the one to survive.

It doesn’t matter, he supposes. He’ll be dead within the year either way – the previous round of experiments have ruined his spinal chord beyond repair, he hasn’t felt his legs in months, and he’s fairly sure he’s caught pneumonia in the cold citadel the Supreme Leader resides in. (But perhaps he could have squeezed in a pity fuck before he dies, at least.)

_Ease your mind, child_ , the wretched voice of Snoke spills into Hux’s mind, cold and clammy like everything else in this place, and he shudders in his gurney. _I have foreseen your transformation. You will be making use of your new body soon enough_.

Hux tries very hard to keep his mind blank in response.

They wheel him into the throne room where Snoke awaits them. He’s turning over the orange kyber crystal Hux had picked out between his bony fingers; he hadn’t really understood what difference it made which kyber crystal Snoke attempted to place his mind inside. Some Force superstition, perhaps, when really he’d only childishly picked it from the selection of crystals presented to him because it matched his ginger hair. Lying on another gurney to one side of the throne is the artificial replica of Hux’s body. The face- _his_ face’s eyes are closed serenely, no dark purple bags under them like his real eyes. It isn’t quite as gaunt as he has become, coloured with a faint dusting of pink over the cheeks that his sallow face hasn’t seen in years. The droid body’s red hair shines bright and vibrant, even in the gloom, where his own is matted and greasy, and he notes with some envy that the new body is taller than he’s managed to grow, though no less slim.

“Well, child?” Snoke prompts, and Hux starts – the adults have been talking for a few minutes now while he’d been lost in thought, it seems. “Shall we begin?”

Hux swallows and nods sharply, schooling his features into cold determination. His father is giving him a curious expression that he can’t decipher; he resolves to at least face his death with dignity under the Commandant’s gaze. Snoke’s guards wheel him up to the foot of the throne so he lies side by side with his replica. In a heavy, shambling effort of a motion, the Supreme Leader raises to his feet, shuffling achingly slowly down the steps, before hovering one gnarled hand over Hux’s forehead, crystal held delicately between thumb and forefinger in the other.

“You will serve me well,” he soothes, and Hux feels no comfort at all. Then Snoke’s fingers touch his forehead, and there is only pain.

Distantly, he thinks he might be screaming; there is a feeling like lightning or electricity burning through his body, grinding through his bones and setting him on fire, until Hux can’t feel his body at all and he _is_ the lightning, a pure, violent agony without form or senses. Any moment now, surely, _surely_ if there is a merciful creator, he will be dead and this will be over – but it keeps going and going and burning and ripping and _hurting_ until he feels like- like a lightning bolt searching for the nearest thing to ground itself and dissipate this miserable energy, he snags on something and gratefully hurtles his consciousness towards it, screaming for release.

For one blissful moment, the pain breaks, and Hux’s awareness spreads through this vessel, whatever it may be-

\- and then someone turns his new body on, and a whole new kind of agony begins. He thinks he might be screaming again – his mind is full of feedback, thousands and thousands of binary signals shouting and clamouring for attention from all sides, assaulting him with information he doesn’t know what to do with or how to process and _too much too much too many, turn it off, turn me off, please,_ _I can’t, I can’t, let me die_.

Someone must take pity on him, he thinks, or perhaps his screaming has already broken his voice synthesizer, because in the mess of ones and zeros something is suddenly switched off; he chases it, and one by one the binary begins to obey him, sensor by sensor, circuit by circuit shutting down, until everything disappears and it’s just _him_ again, alone but for one lingering connection, neither physical nor digital, tying him to the artificial body.

Months from now, Hux will find out that it took him a full week of screaming and seizing before his voice synthesizer shorted out, another thirty hours to switch himself off – but in this moment, there is only perfect nothingness.

 

 *

 

_Subject Age 22, Body #01_  
_18 Years Post-Battle of Endor_  
_Specialist Mission #31, Target: (Redacted)_  
_Dispatch method: N/A_

 

By his internal chronometer, Hux has been lounging around Snoke’s apprentice’s room for about five hours now. It’s getting late into the evening, around 2200 in the standard Imperial day cycle, by his estimation, and he’s yet to see hide or hair of his bedmate. It’s not that Hux isn’t a patient droid – but he’s made the bed ten times, smoothed out every wrinkle, inspected and catalogued every gouge in the walls, nosed through every closet and cranny (only black robes, how dull), and now there’s nothing left to distract him from his mind wildly imagining what sort of hideous, awful beast he’s about to submit himself to.

Which is why he’s wholly unprepared for the sight of the pale, awkward man that does limp into the room half an hour later.

Hux shifts minutely in his position lying sideways across the bed, back to propping himself up on one elbow with a sheet preserving a single, laughable shred of modesty over his narrow hips, tilting his head curiously at the dark-haired human – but that small movement is enough to startle the man, it seems, because his head snaps up wildly in alarm.

The man throws out an arm and Hux finds himself flung violently towards the wall, lower body crashing against the headboard and the Force pinning his neck against the ruined walls. Definitely the apprentice, then, the droid thinks mirthlessly and with no small amount of irritation.

“ _Stop_ ,” he barks out, and the fact that he’s able to speak at all seems to surprise Snoke’s apprentice enough to let him drop back down onto the pillows.

The dark-haired man’s mouth opens and closes of its own volition a few times, lips trying to form words and failing miserably as he attempts to make sense of the intruder in his bedroom. Hux reaches a hand to his neck, gingerly pressing against the synth-skin to check for dents in the metal underneath. Finding himself intact and thanking the heavens for durasteel, he turns his attention to the man still floundering in the entryway – barely a man, Hux thinks, he can hardly be much older than twenty. There are dark circles under his eyes, and in only a black tank top and training leggings, the bruises and scrapes littering his arms and shoulders are clearly visible.

 “…A…droid?” the man mutters, more to himself, before his expression darkens and what could be a handsome face twists into something ugly and furious. “What the fuck,” he hisses, “what the _fuck?_ _Who sent you_?”  

“Snoke,” Hux answers, aiming for something light and easy but not quite masking his irritation. He knew being sent to warm the bed of the Supreme Leader’s apprentice was a punishment, but the man has been in the room less than three minutes and already it’s a trial. “Who else?”

“ _What_ ,” the man snaps out again, hands clenching and unclenching into fists, air seeming to crackle around him. “Why would he-“

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Apparently he’s going to have to spell this out. “I have been ordered to serve your needs, my Lord Apprentice,” Hux says evenly.

“Why would he… _what is this_ ,” the man continues, starting to pace now and completely ignoring the droid in his bed. “Is this- is this what Snoke really thinks of me? What, that I, that I can’t control my _base desires_ , now?” he spits, more agitated by the second. “That I need some cold, metal hole to stick my dick in, to keep me sane, is that it? I’m not so- so _pathetic_ that I’d reduce myself to fucking a damn pleasure droid-“

“So don’t fuck me then!” Hux interrupts loudly, truly exasperated and openly glaring at him now. “It’s no skin off my nose.”

That, finally, gets the man to look at him, and he seems surprised that Hux is still there, taking the droid in fully for the first time. His pale, porcelain skin, spread languidly against the black sheets, the barely visible, hair-thin seams that separate his synth-skin into a jigsaw puzzle of pieces, slim waist and narrow shoulders, long legs...the apprentice flushes, as if it’s only just truly hit him what Hux is here for. Good _grief_.

“What’s your name?” Hux asks, forcing himself to soften his voice and slinking seductively up the bed like he was taught to years ago. Obviously, a different approach is needed with this idiot.

“…Kylo Ren,” the man grits out eventually, still standing stiffly at the doorway, and it occurs to Hux that- oh. _Oh_.

“Am I the first to share your bed, Kylo?” Hux tilts his head curiously, and by the way Kylo flushes an even deeper shade of red, he’s pretty sure he’s hit the mark. _Lucky me, a virgin with anger management issues_.

“I’m not supposed to-“ Kylo starts, hands waving in the air as he struggles to find the words, “I’m not supposed to have…attachments. To people. It’s forbidden.”

Hux huffs a quiet, ironic laugh under his breath. “How fortunate for you then, that I am merely an object and not a person,” he smiles crookedly. “What was it? A ‘cold, metal hole to stick your dick in’, you said?” Kylo swallows nervously. Is this awkward boy really who Snoke has placed all his faith in, who shredded the metal walls of this room, Hux wonders? His dark eyes flit over the droid’s body, straying every few moments to where the sheet still just about covers Hux before pointedly looking somewhere else.

“Is this a test?” Kylo asks quietly after a while.

_For me, maybe,_ Hux thinks sarcastically. “Ask Snoke yourself, why don’t you?” he sighs out loud instead.

The dark-haired man bristles, drawing himself to his full height. “Fine,” he snaps, “I will.” His eyes take on a glassy quality, looking into the middle distance as if he’s listening for something – Snoke hasn’t been in Hux’s head since he was ripped out of his original body, but he still recognizes that look Force users get when doing their telepathic nonsense. Kylo blinks the expression away after a while, limping a few steps further into the room and finally allowing the door to slide shut behind him. He waves a hand absently to lock it, brows knitting together in confusion.

“Well?” Hux prompts.

“He said you’re- my reward,” Kylo says haltingly. “For recent- it. It doesn’t matter.”

“Do you deserve me?” Hux teases, leaning back on his elbows and looking up at Kylo through his lashes (pink, to match his hair; Hux can appreciate that attention to detail from his handlers, at least). Kylo shrugs self-consciously before stumbling a few steps further towards the bed. “You’re limping,” Hux says gently, patting the space beside him. “Come sit down and let me see.” He shifts, unnecessarily, to the side to make more space, letting the sheet fall away, and from Kylo’s sharp intake of breath, Hux knows his spell has been cast.

The Force-user sits down heavily, eyes now very much focused between the droid’s legs. “You’re…really a droid?” he mumbles. “You don’t have- I can’t feel you, in the Force, but you’re so…”

“So what?” Hux smiles, reaching a hand out to tilt Kylo’s chin up with one thin finger. Without that petulant expression, the man _is_ handsome, in an odd, crooked sort of way. Hux lets his fingertip trail down from Kylo’s chin, over his Adam’s apple, his collarbone, down along the swell of his firm pectoral muscles to the hard ridges of his abdomen. Perhaps this won’t be such a punishment after all – he’s certainly been ordered to bed worse looking men and women in his short career.

“ _Real_ ,” Kylo shudders under the attention. “How did he know I- my…preferences?”

“The Supreme Leader is supposed to know everything, is he not?” Hux tuts, leaning into Kylo’s space until their lips are only inches apart. “Which is it, that I’m built like a man? Or the pink hair? I could be a woman next time, if you like,” he laughs softly.

“No,” Kylo says sharply. “I like- this. You. You’re very…pretty.” And then, unexpectedly, he leans forward to close the distance between them, kissing Hux tentatively and gently and not at all like somebody who could rend metal walls into a patchwork of vicious grooves with a mere thought. Hux shifts a hand up to tangle his fingers in the dark locks of hair, guiding Kylo into a better angle. The droid sucks sweetly on the plush lips against his own, humming appreciatively when Kylo copies him, big, clumsy hands coming up to pet at his silky pink hair, bold enough to flick his tongue out and press deeper into Hux’s mouth. Kylo’s hands move down suddenly to grab Hux’s ass, easily pulling the droid onto his lap. He leaves his hands there, Hux notes with amusement, kneading and squeezing and trying to pull him against- _oh_.

“Impatient,” Hux chides with a smirk, pulling away from the kiss but grinding obligingly against the stiff bulge pressing insistently at him anyway. It’s worth it for the startled gasp it punches out of Kylo alone. This is almost too easy, the poor boy already eating right out of Hux’s hand. He thinks, briefly, of being alone and cold and horny and sixteen in this very same citadel and takes pity, continuing to shift his hips slowly. “You’ve decided you _do_ want your reward then, I take it?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Kylo breathes, looking up at Hux wildly. He gulps. “Please.”

“Ah, but we were going to take care of those injuries first, weren’t we?” Hux soothes, sliding his fingers smoothly up underneath Kylo’s shirt to tug it over his head. He frowns a little at the mess of scars, bruising and scabs over the torso revealed to him; he didn’t think Force training was quite so…bloody. “Poor thing,” he says, all mock sweetness, stroking his knuckles along Kylo’s jaw. “Want me to rub bacta on these?”

Kylo squirms uncomfortably, seemingly torn between chasing every gentle touch and wanting to pull away from the softness of concern. “I don’t need it,” he grumbles eventually, pawing at Hux and trying to pull him closer again.

The droid pulls back entirely instead, Kylo hissing his displeasure and chasing after him. “Let me see that leg you were limping on, at least,” Hux murmurs, fluttering his eyelashes, and he hooks his fingers over the top of Kylo’s leggings and goodness, _finally_ the dark-haired man seems to get where he’s going with this if the startled, pleased expression he suddenly dons is anything to go by. The taller man eagerly shifts his hips up to awkwardly tug his leggings down and off, along with his underwear, and Hux can’t help but be a little charmed by his inexperienced enthusiasm.

He’s a little less happy when he sees the leg Kylo limped in on. “Stars, Kylo, what did you _do_?” he asks with genuine concern at the sight of the large, messy gash ripping across the man’s right calf. It’s been haphazardly stitched together – possibly by Kylo himself – and the surrounding area is bruised and angry looking.

“It’s fine,” Kylo grunts, but the pained expression he makes when Hux presses his thumb against the wound gives him away. “Forget it, can we- can you-“

Hux shuts him up by pressing a gentle kiss, barely there, to his knee, just above. For whatever reason this idiot seems to be important to Snoke, and left alone this injury looks worryingly likely to get infected. That’s what he tells himself, at least, completely ignoring his long dead, definitely non-existent conscience piping up with a thousand worries about this naïve boy. “How about,” the droid mouths against the inside of Kylo’s thigh, “you let me put bacta on this, and I’ll blow you for being good afterwards.” Kylo makes a choking noise and goes bright red again. Hux smirks up at him. “Good. We’re agreed, then.”

He gets up and disappears into the refresher, knowing full well that Kylo’s eyes are glued to the slight sway of his ass as he pads away. He’d found the bacta before in the bored hours he’d been waiting, so he’s back out soon enough, kneeling between Kylo’s legs again.

“There we go,” he says soothingly, rubbing the bacta gel over the wound. He feels Kylo tensing up underneath his hands.

“It’s enough now,” Kylo grumbles, reaching down to grab the droid’s wrists and pull them up closer to his waiting erection.

“Tch,” Hux tuts again, but before Kylo can complain any more he abruptly ducks his head down to suck the tip of Kylo’s dick. The man gives a full body jerk at the sudden sensation, shuddering when Hux pulls off with a wet pop. Kylo’s cock is long enough that he can wrap both hands around it, one twisting firmly at the base of his shaft and the other up towards the head, and _thick_ and leaking precome already; this won’t last long, but he can hardly blame the poor touch-starved thing, so obligingly he replaces one hand with his mouth, lapping from the frenulum up around the slit before swallowing Kylo down.

“ _Shit_ ,” Kylo curses above him, hips stuttering and bumping his cock deeper still. He wasn’t built with a gag reflex – small blessings, Hux thinks, but he’s not entirely sure how deep he’s built to take something in his throat, either. He slurps noisily, tongue swirling up and down the shaft as he goes, Kylo’s thighs trembling beneath him. He likes to think, under Madam’s tutelage, that he’s become particularly good at giving head.

He pulls back a little to look up at Kylo through his eyelashes, considering dipping back down to try and take him to the base when, before he can, Kylo is suddenly coming in warm, wet spurts. It takes Hux by surprise enough that he opens his mouth, Kylo’s cock slipping out and streaking his face with ropey streams of cum.

“ _Shit!”_ Kylo curses again, but now there’s a note of panic and embarrassment to it. “Sorry, fuck, I’m sorry-“ He yelps when Hux sucks the tip of his cock again in response, giving one last weak twitch at the sensation.

“Shhh, it’s fine,” Hux hums gently, feeling oddly pleased with himself. Kylo looks down at him awkwardly, ready to protest again, but he’s easily distracted enough when Hux raises a finger against the cum on his face, gathering it up and licking his finger clean. “It’s flattering.”

Kylo looks unconvinced. “Should I- uh. You-“

Hux raises himself up off the floor to stretch contentedly along the bed next to Kylo. “Hmm?”

“Don’t you want me to…?” Kylo shuffles alongside him, seeming disappointed suddenly. “You’re not hard.”

That punches a laugh out of Hux, and the taller man’s face instantly sours and curls in angrily on itself again. Hux has the decency to feel a little bad, at least. “Kylo, I’m a pleasure droid,” he laughs even as he reaches a hand out to try and smooth the crease that’s formed in Kylo’s brow.

“So?” he huffs. “It’s still- polite, isn’t it? To reciprocate?”

“You’re sweet,” Hux smiles with a genuineness surprising even himself, tugging Kylo to lie down too. (He very pointedly does not tell Kylo he’s the first to ever offer, kissing his pouting lips instead.) Kylo’s bad mood doesn’t last long under the renewed attention, melting bonelessly against him, but-

“There’s really nothing you want me to do?” Kylo mumbles against Hux’s lips. “I can,” he pauses, distracted when Hux introduces his teeth, “get hard again pretty soon, I can last longer,” he promises, so terribly earnest that Hux’s heart would break a little, if he still had one. What a shame, the droid thinks instead, that this awkward, brittle thing belongs to Snoke; he might be tempted to keep him for himself otherwise. But at the thought of Snoke, he-

“You know,” Hux says slowly as the gears both figuratively and literally turn in his head. “Perhaps there is _one_ thing you could do for me in return.” Perhaps; he thinks of his kyber crystal, of his blueprints, of the droid project’s data files still somewhere in this citadel.

Perhaps indeed.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are a few OCs in this, but they're only really to move the story along more than anything. Sorry if that bugs anyone!

_Subject Age 17_  
_13 Years Post-Battle of Endor_  
_Arkanis Academy_

It takes Hux almost a full year to learn how to control his new body.

They – the scientists behind the project, he assumes – try to turn him on again a few times after he first manages to shut everything down; it’s easier and faster every time, after the initial disorienting rush of binary that comes with being forced online, to turn everything off. He’s not sure whether they realize he’s doing it consciously or whether they give up on forcing him awake, but eventually he’s left under long enough that he can begin his own tentative first steps to controlling his body.

He refuses, will _not_ be trapped here in the dark for all of eternity; this mantra in mind, he begins by switching on a single sensor at random. Statistically speaking he should have guessed it would be one in his fingers, with the sheer number of them installed there – a sensor at the tip of his right ring finger sparks to life. Hux cautiously spills out from there to the rest of the sensors connected to the first knuckle of that finger. There’s a motor here, a joint, something to move – with an absurd amount of effort he can even manage to tap his finger against something (what, he can’t understand yet – a surface, a solid, a line of feedback).

He taps out a message repeatedly in old Imperial radio code: _stop turning me on and let me figure this out_.

After the hundredth-odd time he’s tapped this out, somebody must finally put the rhythmic movement together, because his finger is moved by external sources, repetitively tapping out _acknowledged_ in reply.

One knuckle becomes a whole finger, becomes all five, becomes his hand and wrist, until he’s registering his whole arm moving restlessly. Some bright scientist begins to brush things against him, tapping out what they are in code with his finger after each object; this sensation is soft, this is sharp, this is wet, dry, hot, cold, sticky, smooth. They test him, afterwards, asking him to tap out responses to each input, until slowly he doesn’t even have to analyze the information. The feelings just are.

 _Feeling_ , one of the scientists tells him, _is just the ability to form an appropriate emotional or physical reaction to sensory input_. The other senses, though, are harder to grasp; for months, sight is impossible. Turning on his eyes presents him with a barrage of nonsensical binary all at once, and no matter how he squints he can’t make sense of it. When he tells the scientists this, they fill what is apparently his field of view with single colours, then pairs of them in different shapes and sizes, more and more detailed until, nine months after he was placed in the droid body, he can finally see the room he’s being held in.

At some point they’ve moved him back to the lab on Arkanis. He recognizes a few of the scientists, at one point even thinks he sees his Father scrutinizing him through a safety window; he’s laid out on a table and hooked up to consoles analyzing his every datashift. Vision is…sharper, now, or perhaps his human body had decayed enough that he hadn’t realized how bad his eyesight was at the end of his life. Hearing and movement come easily enough after that, though, embarrassingly, he spends a month chirping in binary like a common maintenance droid before he figures out the mechanisms of his voice synthesizer. Taste and smell never return, replaced instead with an intricate awareness of every part of his interior body and vague readouts on atmospheric conditions.

Thirteen months after his death, he walks on stiff, wobbly legs into his Father’s office to give him a mechanical salute, and for perhaps the first time in memory, Commandant Brendol Hux looks proud of his son.

 

*

 

_Subject Age 18_  
_14 Years Post-Battle of Endor_  
_Eros VI training compound_

 

“You may call me Madam, and nothing else,” the Togruta informs him coldly.

“Yes, Madam,” Hux replies promptly, standing stiffly at parade rest. The Togruta woman regards him critically, and Hux takes the time to catalogue his new tutor himself; she has long, striped lekku reaching down to her knees, and tall, elegant montrals to match. Her skin is red, save for the white markings on her severe face and the grey stripes of her lekku, and she is dressed in loose, black robes. But perhaps the most striking thing about her is the half-mask that covers one side of her face – Hux can see, just peeking out from under it, that the skin beneath is warped and wrinkled. A burn wound, possibly acid, he thinks.

The Togruta curls her lip disdainfully, apparently having come to a judgement of her own on her new pupil. “I suppose I can do _something_ with him,” she says irritably to Chief Engineer Helphon, a tired-looking, middle-aged man with salt and pepper hair slicked back neatly.

“Good,” Helphon nods. After his swift and secretive graduation from the Arkanis Academy, Hux had been passed into the Chief Engineer’s care for the next part of his training; his unusual situation has him set for a career in espionage and more…specialized missions. “I trust you will train him well. This droid is an important asset to the First Order,” Helphon continues. With that, he gives each of them a sharp nod, Hux saluting automatically, before turning on his heel to return to his shuttle, leaving the droid and Togruta quite alone.

Once the vessel has taken off, Madam turns to Hux and rips off the half-mask.

“Do you know what this?” she barks out, gesturing to the angry mess of scarred, knotted skin that covers half of her face. She has no eye on this side, skin stretched taut and painful to cover the socket. He thinks that, once, she must have been astoundingly beautiful, but with the scars and the severe lines of too-early aging on the other side of her face, there is only a ghost of her former beauty left.

“No, Madam,” Hux says.

“This is the price of failure,” Madam snaps. “Remember that, when you look at me.” She tucks the mask into the folds of her sleeves and half-stomps, half-marches towards the compound, Hux closely on her heel.

 

*

 

 _Subject Age 22, Body #01_  
_18 Years Post-Battle of Endor_  
_Specialist Mission #31, Target: (Redacted)_  
_Dispatch method: N/A_

 

Hux tugs absently at the dark, unruly tufts of pubic hair his nose had been buried in only moments before, entertaining himself by pressing feather-light kisses to Kylo’s spent cock. As promised, he had indeed lasted a full minute longer for the second blowjob Hux gave him, coming just as copiously as the first time. The poor boy didn’t stand a chance of holding out any longer, really, once Hux figured out that his throat is indeed built deep enough to swallow someone as big as Kylo down fully.  

“How old are you?” Hux wonders out loud, enjoying the weak twitching of Kylo’s softening cock against his lips as he speaks.

“Eighteen,” Kylo sighs, still lying back dreamily on the bed in a post-orgasmic haze. Well. Still a teenager; that explains the impressive speed at which he got it up again, Hux supposes. “Nearly nineteen,” Kylo adds defensively, as if sensing Hux’s train of thought.

Hux hums, pulling himself back up the bed to lie beside the Supreme Leader’s apprentice. No sooner than he makes himself comfortable does Kylo roll clumsily on top of him, curling his arms around Hux’s sides and resting his head on his chest – his sensors estimate that the man must be a good two hundred pounds of hard muscle. He makes his displeasure known by carding through Kylo’s shaggy hair, tugging out the knots a little harder than necessary.

“How old are you?” Kylo murmurs against his chest; he has his ear pressed against him now, listening intently to the low hum of the droid’s systems.

“I was built six years ago,” Hux replies. A truth, at least, even if Kylo doesn’t need to know the real answer.

The taller man fidgets slightly, settling and resettling himself. Annoying. “Do you,” Kylo begins, and Hux can feel the motion of his jaw as he licks his lips nervously, “have you- do you do this a lot?”

Hux snorts. “Why?” he teases. “Going to kill my other lovers, so you can have me all for yourself?”

“Yes,” Kylo answers instantly, raising himself up on his elbows to glare at Hux with dark eyes. The droid gives him a considering look and tries not to look too pitying; he wonders how long this sort of childish attachment to his first bed partners lasted. Certainly not more than a few days, with Madam constantly barking at him.

“Shame,” he replies instead. “They’re already dead. I’d have killed you too by now, usually.” Kylo’s murderous expression blinks into one of confusion. Hux sighs. “Yes, Kylo, I do ‘this’ a lot. I’m a weapon.”

“Thought you were a pleasure droid,” Kylo retorts, leaning his chin back down where Hux’s sternum would be, were it not a metal scaffold now.

“’A creature is never so vulnerable as when they’re making love’,” Hux quotes, the memory of Madam’s sneering face saying this appearing in his mind again. “I’m…more of an assassin droid, I like to think.” Only wishes his handlers remembered that.

Kylo hums. There’s a hungry glint in his eyes as he watches Hux carefully. “You couldn’t kill me,” he says haughtily after a while.

“Perhaps like this, I could,” Hux smirks, bringing his hands up to loosely circle Kylo’s throat, squeezing lightly just once. “I can’t say I fancy my chances against a Force-user out of bed, though.”

This is apparently what passes for erotic in Kylo’s twisted mind, because he launches himself up to bite hungrily at Hux’s lips at that, and, even taking into account that the boy is only eighteen, he’s amazed to feel Kylo hardening against him for a third time.

 

*

 

_Subject Age 18_  
_14 Years Post-Battle of Endor_  
_Eros VI training compound_

 

“A creature is never so vulnerable as when they’re making love,” Madam sneers, and then Hux abruptly finds his head separated from his body.

Chief Engineer Helphon is absolutely _livid_ when he’s called back to Eros VI to fix Hux, but the Togruta adamantly insists decapitating him was an important part of his training. Certainly an unforgettable one, anyway – one minute she had been tutoring him on the most effective way to make a human man fall apart by riding his cock, criticizing him soundly for not arching his back enough, not moaning brokenly enough, not bouncing his hips up and down the other training droid fast enough, and then the next he was looking at his headless body from the floor on the other side of the room.

Her dubious curriculum had begun with close-quarters, weapon-free murder. At the Academy, Hux had always been more comfortable hidden behind the scope of a sniper rifle, more so with the improved eyesight his new body affords him; Hux now finds himself accomplished in the art of digging his thumbs into eye sockets and pushing at just the right angle, proficient in snapping necks one-handed, worryingly adept at garrotting (and don't his hollow wrists make for a good place to hide razor-wire?) and surprisingly talented at keeping a misdirection going long enough to poison a drink.

Despite the sudden and really quite uncalled for decapitation, Hux finds himself rather liking Madam. She’s gruff and jaded and has all the patience of a wampa, but her knowledge of how and when to hurt and please is unparalleled. He learns at great length that she had been something of a courtesan in her youth, seducing rich lovers into writing her into their wills before murdering them and moving on to the next high society planet, earning her the nickname “the Widow”. Her mistake had been to attempt to do this with an Imperial Admiral; violently stripped of her flawless looks and banished to Eros VI, she has been training pleasure droids and assassins in a bitter haze since.

“You are a weapon,” she tells Hux solemnly one night, her one yellow eye scowling down at him. “You are an actor, a shapeshifter. You must learn to be whatever they want, both the Madonna and the whore.”

It doesn’t come easily to him; the academy and the droid project is all he’s ever known. He has as little idea what a nobleman’s spoilt, promiscuous son acts like as he does a charming smuggler in the Outer Rim. But he can copy well enough – he spends long hours mirroring Madam’s easy, languid movements, at one moment meek and shy and in the next predatory and dangerous. For someone whose natural instinct seems to be to stomp and shout angrily, she slips between her carefully cultivated personas with astounding ease.

He spends a year in her company. He learns when to arch his back just so, to look over his shoulder with hooded eyes and gently bite his lip, to pretend to be holding back a moan. He learns how to please both men and women and everything in between, how to read their reactions and desires from their face alone.

And he learns to spot the exact moment when someone is lost enough to kill.

Madam gives Hux a sad, pitying look, before he goes, perhaps the only gentleness she’s ever shown to him; they’re waiting for Helphon’s transport shuttle in the exact spot he met her in, squinting their eyes against the dust and sand being blown up by the wind.

“This job will break you,” she tells him. He presses a parting kiss to her scarred cheek. Hux already knows.

 

*

 

 _Subject Age 22, Body #01_  
_18 Years Post-Battle of Endor_  
_Specialist Mission #31, Target: (Redacted)_  
_Dispatch method: N/A_

 

“How long do I get to keep you?” Kylo sighs against Hux’s throat, where he’s been biting and making a terrible mess of the thin synth-skin there. Force help whatever living lover he first takes, Hux thinks, but he’s hardly going to complain if for once someone is gripping his hips as bruisingly tight as he likes to be held. He wonders, sometimes, if he’d prefer a more gentle touch if he was still human.

“I will be collected in the morning,” Hux replies as Kylo begins nipping at the other side of his neck. “The First Order has more important things for me to do than warm your bed, you know.”

“I disagree,” Kylo says petulantly, punctuating this by breaking the synth-skin entirely. He digs a finger in roughly underneath, feeling the durasteel beneath with some fascination, and- ahh, _this_ time Hux is getting hard too, shifting to try and coax Kylo’s calloused hands down between his legs. The dark-haired man swallows loudly, which Hux has learnt in the last two hours means he’s trying to ask for something again. “Can I,” he starts quietly, “may I…”

“…fuck me?” Hux finishes, since Kylo seems utterly incapable.

“Yes,” Kylo groans, tipping his head up to kiss Hux’s chin pleadingly. Instead of answering, the droid pushes him to lie down on his back, blue eyes looking down hungrily at him through pink lashes. Kylo’s breath stutters when Hux takes his own dick in hand instead, giving himself a few languid strokes. “You _can_ get hard!” he accuses.

“I never said I _couldn’t_ ,” Hux huffs with amusement, taking Kylo’s length in his other hand to stroke in tandem. He gives them each one last twist of his wrist before drawing back and lining Kylo up with his hole. “Ready?” he purrs, nudging back just far enough that the head of Kylo’s cock brushes up against his wet entrance.

“ _Yes_ ,” the Force-user whimpers, and lets out the most pleasant, rumbling moan when Hux pushes back to take him in. He’s biting his plush lips hard enough that he might well draw blood as he watches his dick disappear into the droid.

“Good?” Hux soothes as he bottoms out, pausing to let Kylo adjust to the new sensation. The dark-haired man nods weakly, and at this point, Hux isn’t entirely sure how this night was meant to be a punishment – Kylo fills him so deeply and perfectly, brushing up against delicate sensors buried far enough that they’re rarely reached, and the contented cycle of air he sighs out is, for once, genuine.

“Fuck,” Kylo whispers as Hux slowly starts moving, raising his hips to drag slowly upwards then sink down again at a glacial pace. “ _Fuck_ , you’re so- so tight, _Force_ you’re beautiful, _please_ -“ and, well. With a compliment like that, how can Hux not speed up? Kylo’s hands dart out when he does to take up a bruising grip on the droid’s hips again, head falling back to look up desperately at Hux like he’s some sort of pink-haired deity.

“Aren’t you _big_ ,” Hux purrs, grinning lazily at the adoring look on Kylo’s face, and the taller man’s hips stutter and jerk upwards to meet him. “Not too cold for you? Too metallic?” he teases, quite unable to resist the jab now that he has Snoke’s apprentice falling apart under his ministrations.

“ _Warm_ ,” is all Kylo manages to choke out before he keens wordlessly, bless him, panting as Hux picks up the pace yet again, rolling his hips into Kylo’s iron grip, clenching rhythmically. His nails dig into the synth-skin, and Hux is reminded of the gouged out walls surrounding them, his own engine stuttering at the thought of the strength in those hands. One big hand slips down to wrap around Hux’s cock, and the high, whining gasp it pulls from the droid gets Kylo moving, tugging much too hard, much too firm for a human, but the perfect pressure exactly for his artificial skin.

“ _Yes_ ,” it’s Hux’s turn to moan out, “darling, yes, _oh_ ,” he gasps, and with his other hand and what the droid strongly suspects is the help of the force Kylo lifts Hux’s hips up to still above him so he can thrust upwards, hips snapping up mercilessly, Hux whining “Kylo, _Kylo, Kylohhh_ ,” like a mantra.

“My doll,” Kylo whispers, “my doll,” and for the first time on one of these missions, Hux comes.

He shudders and spasms above Kylo as the excess electrical charge of orgasm rips through his systems, slamming down heavily and dragging the Force-user along with him; some distant part of him has the presence of mind to wonder how the hell Kylo is coming so much for a third time that evening, let alone that there’s any seed left in him at all at this point, while the rest of his mind focuses entirely on the _warm wet slick full good_ the sensors deep inside are supplying him with.

Kylo is looking up at him with bright, awe-filled eyes when Hux comes back to himself, his oversized hands cradled gently around the droid’s slack-jawed face.

“’Doll’?” Hux huffs with a smile, and despite everything that’s just happened Kylo flushes bright red again.

“You never- you didn’t tell me your name,” he says sheepishly, “and you’re so- your skin...” Hux smiles at him, leaning down to lie on top of Kylo. He folds his arms over Kylo’s chest and pillows his chin there as the Force-user both struggles to catch his breath and to find his words.

“There was…when I was a little kid,” Kylo mumbles, quiet, like this is some terrible secret he’s about to impart, “I was taken to this memorial museum of artefacts from Alderaan. There was this porcelain doll on display- I wanted to play with it, but I was too young to understand that…I accidentally broke the glass, and- anyway. You. You remind me. Of that.”

Kylo moves his hand to stroke sleepily at Hux’s pink hair, seeming (finally) sated, and the droid rewards him with a sad, gentle smile.

If only Kylo knew.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the slow updates, guys! There's a fair bit of Hux backstory I want to get through before we get back to Kylo and Hux together again, but the more-plot heavy stuff has been tripping me up a bit lately. 
> 
> This chapter gets a little dark! We're dealing with the details of Hux's job for the next couple of chapters, and it's not gonna be pretty, so consider yourselves warned. I've updated the tags with a few more warnings.

_Subject Age 19, Body #01_  
_15 Years Post-Battle of Endor_  
_Specialist Mission #09, Target: Duke Tem Rohdora_  
_Dispatch method: Accidental suffocation_

 

The novelty of Hux’s job wears off within the first three missions.

There is a certain sense of power that comes with being able to seduce his targets, with seeing the shocked betrayal in their eyes when the life drains out of them, true. But as he sits and watches the sleeping Duke Rohdora in bed next to him, waiting patiently for the poison he’d laced his Corellian brandy with to take effect, Hux can’t help but feel his body was meant for _more_. He doesn’t have to sleep or eat, he can do complex sums and algorithms in his processors as fast as any computer, he can shoot a target dead centre from what would be record breaking distances were he human, and yet, here he is, in a politician’s bed.

Rohdora makes an unpleasant choking sound next to him and the droid makes a face. Here it comes; he places his full weight on the Duke’s chest to keep the man on his back as he vomits in his sleep. The poison wasn’t even lethal, really – just a small dose of bacteria, enough to make sure he’d throw up at some point. All Hux had to do was wear him out and time it just right. Totally untraceable, a tragic accident, the poor Duke who drank too much and partied too hard.

Hux sighs as Rohdora spasms and seizes beneath him as his body struggles for air. Disgusting. He’d taken forever to get the hint that his new, blonde ‘butler’ was flirting with him, and just as long to get it up. In fact, the droid has been terribly disappointed with all of his targets so far – nine missions and not a single good fuck. He’d also discovered that, despite his new body, yes, he is very much still gay, finding the two women he’d been sent to take out a tedious chore to bed.

With a final rattle that Hux has already become used to hearing, Rohdora stills underneath him. Fucking finally. He peels back the synth-skin over his wrist to retrieve the hidden communicator he keeps in the hollow there, tapping out a quick code to his handlers to let them know he’s ready for retrieval. Stretching out his joints, he stands and collects up the pieces of his ridiculous butler uniform – the small ship is parked on the other side of the city, it will be a while before they collect him yet. His communicator beeps with acknowledgement and a missive to be ready on the balcony in twenty minutes. He entertains himself by digging through the late Duke’s personal effects, though little of interest comes up – some porn holos (their information had been correct, the Duke did indeed have a thing for blondes), a couple of credit chips with truly obscene amounts of money on them (too suspicious to take, sadly) and a collection of exotic cigarras.

He takes one and lights it, moving out to the balcony to wait. Cigarras don’t do a thing for him, without lungs or a sense of taste or smell – his sensors only register the various toxins leaking out with the smoke as stray lines of information – but he likes to watch them burn, likes the feel of them between his fingers. A few minutes later, a speeder pulls up just below, one of the handlers peering up at him expectantly, and Hux flicks the cigarra away, jumping in deftly.

Rohdora is found in the morning. The butler is never seen again.

 

*

 

_Subject Age 19, Body #01  
The Void – Research and Development Station _

 

“Silvy, _no_ ,” Hux groans at the scalp-piece presented to him.

The little woman gives him an apologetic shrug. The hair is shoulder length and lilac, of all things, which never bodes well. At least they haven’t given him anything pink yet. “If you think this is bad you’re gonna hate what we’re dressing you in,” Silvy says. She’s the scientist in charge of maintaining Hux’s appearance and the creator of the brand of synth-skin widely used on humanoid pleasure droids. Hux is fairly sure that she is only part of the First Order for the near unlimited funding it affords her research; she’s a soft-spoken, dark-skinned, thirty-something year old without the slightest interest in warfare or galactic domination.

“What is it this time?” Hux sighs as she fits the lilac hair on him, before moving back to her desk to retrieve a matching set of eyebrows and eyelashes.

“Mission #22,” she reads aloud from her datapad. “Target is Senator Aosandra of Corellia. Planning a holiday to a gentleman’s resort in Hutt territory, ETA 45 hours. The resort contains a number of private booths, it’s suggested that you lead him into one of those and dispatch him quickly.”

“So I’m a stripper,” Hux grouses, and Silvy only gives him her usual watery, awkward grin.

“At least you’re allowed to use your razor-wire this time?” she tries for cheerful.

“And what has Aosandra done to earn our wrath, then?” the droid sighs as Silvy carefully lays down his eyelashes.

She shrugs. “Hell if I know, Hux, I’m just here to make you pretty. Stop frowning or your eyebrows will lie crooked.”

It’s hard _not_ to frown at that; he’s getting tired of being kept in the dark as to the reasons for these assassinations. It’s not really his place to ask, as a soldier, he knows, but not once has he been asked to retrieve information. Only to infiltrate, seduce, kill, and get out intact. If these people are really important enough to send Hux in, surely there must be more he could be doing. (He tries very hard not to think about the possibility that he’s being wasted on dispatching mere annoyances to the First Order. The thought is too soul-crushing to bear.)

Silvy is about to replace his brown irises from the last mission with purple ones when her comm. unit suddenly pings. “Damn it, what does Helphon want now?” she grumbles at the summons on the screen. “You can do this bit yourself, yeah? They’re like screws, just twist them out and put the brown ones back in the box.” Hux nods, and she hurries out the lab with her white coat billowing behind her.

There’s a two way mirror allowing a window into Silvy’s lab on one side of the room, so he stands in front of it to start removing the old irises – it’s much harder to do on himself, and he has to peel off the synth-skin on his eyelids to make it easier, but after a few minutes of struggling he gets the brown irises out and the new purple pair in.

“Well aren’t you a picture.”

Hux starts, turning from the mirror to regard the officer leaning in the doorway. The man seems to be in his late-twenties, with dark brown hair gelled back neatly in the standard fashion and a leer on his narrow face.

“Can I help you?” Hux asks icily, trying to summon some sort of dignity despite his ridiculous lilac hair and being in nothing but the uniform black undershirt and boxers the First Order provides. He hasn’t even replaced his eyelids yet. “This area is off limits to personnel without clearance to R&D levels 3 and up,” he adds with authority.

The man ignores him. “You’re the pleasure droid the boys in weapons development are talking about, huh? Said you got trained to fuck.”

Hux narrows his eyes. “Cyborg, actually,” he corrects. He rarely makes the distinction around the handful of scientists that know about Snoke’s experiments with kyber crystals, but the way this man’s eyes are travelling over him makes it seem important in this moment. “I was trained to kill. You are off limits here, _sir_.”

“Right, right,” the officer nods absently, moving into the lab and sliding the door shut behind him. “Helphon called a meeting, you know. We got a few hours to kill. How about a demonstration, huh? Show me what R&D 5 did with all that money they put into building you.”

Hux’s skin crawls, hands itching for a weapon, but Silvy doesn’t keep much more than consoles, datapads and loose bundles of synthetic hair and skin in here – there’s a tray of needles somewhere for threading hair into scalp-pieces, but where, _where_ \- the man advances on him, suddenly and without warning. Hux has just enough time to duck out of the way, but the officer gets a handful of his too-long purple hair to drag Hux hard onto the ground, pinning the droid with his weight.

But Hux only needs one hand free to snap a human’s neck.

With an awful crack the officer’s head is twisted to the side, his eyes widening, so comically large and surprised that Hux feels the bizarre urge to laugh. The man slumps down heavily on top of him, boneless, with a gurgle, before the droid rolls out from underneath him and hits the panic button by the door.

Silvy runs in minutes later, Helphon and four stormtroopers on her heel.

“What the _hell_ happened in here?” the Chief Engineer demands when he catches sight of the dead officer, Hux sitting on the floor beside him, head tipped back against the wall. He manages to stand and salute stiffly.

“This officer attempted to force himself on me, sir,” Hux reports tonelessly. “I defended myself.”

Helphon bristles. “This _officer_ was the head engineer on the superweapon project,” he hisses. “Do you know what you have cost us here? _Do you_?! You’re a fucking pleasure droid, Hux. Next time just let them have you, and for star’s sake, _leave them alive_.”

He may as well have slapped Hux. Helphon knows, _Helphon knows_ that Hux was human, was in the damn room when he died – how could he…? Is Hux really worth so little now, as a droid? With a curled lip, Helphon turns on his heel and leaves the lab with a barked order to the stormtroopers to take away the superweapon engineer’s body, leaving the droid trembling with knife-sharp betrayal and cold fury, and Silvy with wide, horrified eyes and her hands slapped firmly over her mouth at the sight of her first corpse, shaking her head repeatedly.

(The next time, though, Hux does leave them alive – he just also castrates them with his plasteel teeth.)

 

*

 

 _Subject Age 20, Body #01_  
_16 Years Post-Battle of Endor_  
_Specialist Mission #14, Target: Senator Saudine_  
_Dispatch method: ~~Poison~~ Blaster fire_

Mission #14 is perhaps only notable because everything goes to shit.

Hux had been dressed as a low-ranking, First Order ambassador for the dinner with Senator Saudine on Hosnian Prime, given black hair slightly longer than regulation but swept back neatly nonetheless, and the fake title ‘Officer Penc’. The clue that it would be a disaster should have been that the bloody First Order sent, instead of _literally anyone else with a digestive system_ , an assassin droid to dinner.

“Is the food not to your liking, Officer?” Saudine asks sweetly; she’s an old human lady, a politician since the days of Palpatine and of blue blood, but there’s a nasty glint to her eyes as she watches Hux hesitate with a fork in his hand.

“Oh, excuse me,” Hux – Officer Penc – whoever he’s supposed to be – replies apologetically. “The journey here left me a little ill I’m afraid. Travelling at lightspeed just doesn’t agree with me.”

Saudine’s eyes sharpen knowingly. “I must insist that you have at least one bite, Officer,” she says gravely. “There has been a string of assassinations recently, and according to our information, the only consistent element between them has been that the suspects never ate or drank a thing.” _Fuck_. “Surely you can have just a little bite to ease an old woman’s paranoia, hmm?”

 _Shit shit shit_. Hux does his best to give her an amused smile, and prays to the heavens that his systems can handle a spoonful of the seafood stew he’s been served with. “Well, if it will ease your mind,” he says magnanimously, and dutifully takes a bite. He very consciously has to try and remember how to chew and swallow, not having eaten in over four years now, and after an agonizing twenty seconds (is that too long? He really can’t recall) manages to get it down. He even, rather smugly, opens his mouth wide with a childish “aahh” to prove it.

For all of one minute Hux thinks he’s got away with it.

Then something inside his torso makes a horrific and unmistakeably mechanical grinding noise, and the Senator’s two bodyguards open fire on him. Well, shit.

Five minutes later and with numerous holes in his torso, one bodyguard’s neck is snapped, the other’s skull smashed against the floor, and Saudine has been shot dead with her own guard’s blaster. _Messy_ , Hux thinks irritably, trying to smooth back his hair into some semblance of order – something that looks like it might be engine oil is dripping steadily from one of the blaster holes ripped through him and his sleeves have bits of brain matter on them. Helphon is going to be furious.

(It is after this mission that his handlers fit him with a temporary holding-tank, should the dinner situation ever repeat itself, and maintenance following missions involving blowjobs become a little less awkward.)

 

*

 

 _Subject Age 22, Body #01_  
_18 Years Post-Battle of Endor_  
_Specialist Mission #30, Target: Senator Urada_  
_Dispatch method: Asphyxiation_

 

The first time Hux breaks, the first time he _truly_ loses all patience, logic and reasoning and descends into a zen of cold fury and vengeance, comes just after mission #30.

“There’s a problem,” Silvy says before mission #30 sheepishly, all nine of the other scientists that work on Hux looking very shifty indeed, and his five mission handlers have the same looks of irritated disbelief on their faces. Though rarely included in these planning missions, Hux has been brought before them for the end of the meeting; earlier, too, Helphon himself had personally briefed him on his next target, stressing with a grim, solemn tone just how much the First Order needs Senator Urada of Coruscant dead. The man has been lobbying for sanctions against them, since the Order has finally begun to sink their fingers into a few lawless sectors of the Outer Rim, their first violent baby steps out of the Unknown regions.

Having Urada killed strikes Hux as far too suspicious, more likely to backfire than help their cause. That they’ve called him into this meeting at all promises nothing but an oncoming clusterfuck.

“Well?” Hux prompts, apparently the only one in the dark about whatever problem is in the way.

Nabett, the current Chief of Droid Affairs, sighs and rubs a stocky hand over his forehead. “Senator Urada is strictly into women,” he answers bluntly. “One of those conservative campaigners, married with five children already and loudly insistent that sex should be for reproductive purposes and nothing else.”

“Sounds like the Senator’s trying to hide something to me,” Private Cel snorts under her breath.

“Regardless,” the section head of espionage and infiltration – Chief Razan, Hux thinks – says, clearing his throat, “we cannot risk Hux being refused.”

“Surely a sniper rifle would be easier,” Hux tries, as he does almost every mission. A few of the mission handlers give him withering glares for his efforts.

“Urada has a guard with him at all times and travels mainly in blasterproof shuttles,” Razan says dismissively. “He’s made an awful lot of enemies with the views he holds publicly. Regardless of your obvious disdain for your _function_ , Hux, taking him out in private is the most logical route.”

“So we’re going to need to turn you into a woman,” Nabett concludes for Razan.

His fifteen superiors all look at Hux expectantly, and not for the first time, the droid wonders if they’re suffering some form of mass hallucination that causes them to come up with this shit. Alas, he was raised better by the Academy than to say so, instead grinding his teeth together and gritting out, “ _How_ , exactly?”

Two of the scientists pull out a replacement attachment for the place his cock usually goes in response, an extraordinary replica of female genitalia, and Hux has to close his eyes and count to twenty very, very slowly to prevent himself from slamming his head against the table.

“This is non-negotiable,” Razan says, already considering the conversation over with and back to shuffling through files on his datapad. “You will be fitted with it this evening in order to get used to it. You will be dropped off on Coruscant in a week, the details are still being finalized. Dismissed, Hux.”

Hux clamps his jaw firmly shut lest the expletives at the tip of his tongue begin pouring out uncontrollably, instead nodding and standing stiffly with a short incline of his head. He tries his best to walk out of the room evenly, but as he exits the door, he hears Silvy commenting quietly, “It’s going to be so fun doing this! Like a dress-up doll, or one of those moving mannequins-“

The door slides shut behind him with a hiss, and Hux’s loud, incoherent swearing doesn’t stop until he reaches his room in the labs.

 

*

 

 _Subject Age 22, Body #01_  
_18 Years Post-Battle of Endor_  
_Specialist Mission #30, Target: Senator Urada_  
_Dispatch method: Asphyxiation_

 

As it turns out, forcing Hux to wear a pussy and pretend to be a skinny young model with a flat chest from Naboo is entirely pointless. Urada is easy enough to seduce with a vague promise of anal sex, something his wife denies him and that the Senator can’t contest without revealing the flimsy reasons for his campaign for purely reproductive intercourse. The vagina the scientists built him remains entirely unused.

Hux is furious. Even strangling Urada with his bare hands does nothing to make him feel better.

Worse still, the droid was absolutely right – the sanctions against the First Order are approved almost immediately upon the discovery of Urada’s blue-faced body the next day, and the staff on the Void descend into a pit of accusations and witch-hunts. Hux stays firmly out of it and as far away from any of his superiors as he can manage, hoping in vain that his anger at this clusterfuck of a mission will pass if he can just pace the corridors of the ship long enough.

Between his sparse missions, he’s mostly left to his own devices and told to await orders ( _and doesn’t that sting too_ , he thinks as he paces down the empty corridors on deck twelve again, when he could be doing something useful for the First Order). He fills his time with practicing for some far-fetched future, a fantasy where he will be put to appropriate use in pushing them forward to victory – target practice, studying engineering, observing the daily lives of the personnel on board. With some effort, he has even managed to make friends with the mainframe computer that controls the Void, invited to slip past firewalls and security codes and sift through Research and Development’s data as he pleases.

The mainframe is a sweet thing, a little old and outdated now, being an Imperial leftover. Perhaps it will make him feel better to connect himself to it. Hux hides himself in one of the processor closets, peeling away the synth-skin at the back of his neck and pulling out one of the cables hidden behind it with practiced hands, before plugging himself in to a port on the wall.

 _Welcome Designation-Hux_ , the mainframe croons at him inside his head. It feels a little like being in a sea of binary, watching currents of information flow past and around him – a security camera’s stream here, an experiment log for a new blaster battery there. He plucks a thread at random, following it to the communications room where Helphon is arguing over hologram with one of his superiors about the Urada cock-up, it seems. Wrinkling his nose in the physical world with distaste, Hux pulls back to look for something else. Mission #30 is the last thing he wants to think about right now.

The next thread of binary leads him to the security feeds in a break room, which seems innocent enough. If Hux closes his eyes and ignores his own visual input, he can even watch the video feed live, like an insect sitting up in the corner of the room. There are a handful of scientists in there eating their evening meals together, Silvy included among them, already deep in conversation.

“-worked so hard on it, and the bastard didn’t even _use_ it,” Joad complains loudly. He’s a gangly-looking scientist, made thinner still by the fish-eye view Hux currently has, and one of the two that had created the new genital attachment for the mission. “That is an _objectively_ perfect pussy. C’mon Silvy, back me up here!”

“Urgh,” Silvy grimaces. She looks up at the ceiling though, considering. “It _is_ kind of a shame though…he looked so pretty with that long red hair I gave him, a little make-up and he totally has the face for it.”

“Think Hux would be up for becoming a her?” Joad wiggles his eyebrows, and the group gathered laughs loudly.

“Fucking creep, you just want a go at Hux yourself,” Fanan accuses with a grin.

“Don’t we all?” Silvy sighs, and Hux violently severs himself from the connection. The mainframe whines at him unhappily in protest, pushing against the malicious swirl of Hux’s thoughts intruding in its background processes, but this. This, from the people that remember he was once human. _This_ , from the scientists that built him, that watched him die.

This, even more than Urada, is the thing that first breaks him.

He whispers cold, sweet nothings to the mainframe, and Joad, Silvy, Fanan, Cel, Razan, Nabett and the twenty-four others on the team that maintains, designs and deploys the assassin droid are suddenly summoned on their comms for an urgent meeting from Helphon’s own private line. He watches them groan and grumble on the security footage, thirty men and women marching into a secluded meeting room on deck four and waiting for the fallout they’ve been expecting since the end of mission #30.

Hux locks them in. With just a thought, he trips the emergency air-filtration systems reserved for isolated gas leaks; caught off guard and starved of oxygen, they die much the same way Urada did.

How very poetic.


End file.
